Peacock, D. Keith, Radical Stages. Alternative History in Modern British Drama, Greenwood

Peacock, D. Keith, Radical Stages. Alternative History in Modern British Drama, Greenwood Press 1991.

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Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, Number 43

Greenwood Press New York Westport, Connecticut London

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peacock, D. Keith.

Radical stages: alternative history in modern British drama D. Keith Peacock.

p. cm.--(Contributions in drama and theatre studies, ISSN 0163-3821; no. 43)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-27888-1 (alk. paper)

1. English drama-- 20th century--History and criticism. 2. Historical drama, English--History and criticism. 3. Social problems in literature. 4. Radicalism in literature. I. Title. II. Series.

PR739.H5P4 1991

882'.91409--dc2O 91-17119

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-17119

ISBN: 0-313-27888-1 ISSN: 0163-3821

First published in 1991

Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

? + ?™

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z.39.48-1984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Introduction 1

PART I

1 Historical Drama 9

2 Presenting the Past 19

3 Private and Public 31

Wesker's Social Realism / 34

The Documentary / 37

John Arden and the Epic / 45

PART II

4 Freedom and Good Order 59

5 A Usable History 79

6 Chronicles and Disillusionment 105

7 Edward Bond's Historical Allegories 139

8 The Woman's Place 153

9 Fact Plus Fiction Equals "Faction" 169

Afterword 179

Notes 181

Bibliography 192

Index 199

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Introduction

In 1956, in the play that inaugurated the New British Theatre, John Osborne's Jimmy Porter looked back in anger at what he considered to be his country's spiritual decline. In the years that followed, many British dramatists were also to reveal an acute consciousness of history, particularly of English history, and were repeatedly to exhibit an almost reflexive tendency to evoke the past in their dramatic exploration of hitherto neglected areas in the social and political life of their country. As Edward Bond has written, "Our age, like every age, needs to reinterpret the past as part of learning to understand itself, so that we can know what we are and what we should do." 1 Indeed, in a theatre that was attempting to chart the kind of new territory referred to above and was to associate itself predominantly with those ideals of social democracy which marked the early years of the post-war period, the examination and use of the past was to become as important as the analysis of the present. Most significantly, in the 1960s historical drama increasingly began to reflect the aspirations and activities of ordinary people rather than the lives and achievements of their rulers and in the 1970s was to become closely associated with the political aspirations of the New Left. It is with the nature and evolution of this radical British historical drama over three decades that this book is concerned.

It must be admitted from the outset that the post- 1956 dramatisation of history has in many cases proved controversial. As might be expected from a theatre born in a period of social protest and associated with youthful rebellion, its opposition to the values and assump-

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tions of the previous generation was also to extend to the reevaluation and even outright rejection of that generation's perception of the past. A nation's history is not simply a record of events but is an agreed version of the past which embodies present values. As such it is a facet of what Marxists have described as that "ideological superstructure" which encompasses other art-forms, the communication media and the education system and is employed by the ruling group to perpetuate its power and dominance. To question or to attack that mythic history is, therefore, according to one's political viewpoint, tantamount either to mounting a revolutionary assault upon a bastion of the establishment or to committing an act of treason. Any variation from that myth--or, worse still, any intentionally alternative interpretation--may in consequence provoke a quite inordinate and even hysterical degree of censure from whichever interest group perceives its values to be threatened. In 1987, for example, Jim Allen's Perdition was to provoke accusations from Zionist organisations of prejudice and factual distortion. In response Max StaffordClark, the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre where the play was scheduled for performance, took the decision shortly before its opening night to cancel the production. There was some irony in the fact that, as a director of the Joint Stock Theatre Company, StaffordClark had during the 1970s been one of the foremost promoters of plays that offered an "alternative" view of history.

The problem with Jim Allen's play was that it suggested that, with the aim of building up a case for the establishment of the new state of Israel, Hungarian Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis in sending Jews to the gas-chambers. In spite of attempts by Allen to draw a distinction between Judaism and Zionism, there were accusations from the Jewish lobby of "anti-semitism" and the dramatist was accused of employing factual inaccuracies and out-of-context quotations in an attempt to mount an ideological attack. While disputing the validity of such accusations, Allen was prepared to admit that his socialist sympathies for the oppressed had indeed in this instance led him to sympathise not with the Zionists but with the dispossessed Palestinians. In common with many left-wing dramatists during the previous thirty years, Allen had himself come face to face with that sacred cow, agreed history, assault upon which would, apparently inevitably, always be taken as an attack upon a whole culture.

Edward Bond, more than any other recent dramatist, has repeatedly attracted the kind of criticism heaped upon the unfortunate Allen. His iconoclastic portrayal of the Royal Family, politicians and other national figures of the Victorian era in his nightmarish historical fantasy, Early Morning ( 1968), and of Britain's most revered national dramatist, William Shakespeare, in Bingo ( 1974), in

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fictional contexts that were clearly pertinent to Britain's political and cultural present, provoked more than their fair share of critical resentment. Indeed Gareth Lloyd Evans, in his introduction to his collection of journalistic theatre criticism, Plays in Review 19561980, deemed it necessary to devote some time to illustrating and attacking Bond's treatment of history in general and of Shakespeare in particular. He claimed that

Any consideration of Bond's plays drops us bang in the middle of the whirlpools aroused by the dramatic use of history, the uncertain eddies it creates between fact and fiction and the critical assessment of them. Bond is a notable example of the buccaneer's way with history. He doesn't ignore it, but he makes it walk the plank of concepts, values, shibboleths, opinions--of which those contemporary with the events knew nothing, or knew them in forms very different from the modern shape he gives them. 2

While allowing that dramatists have always exhibited a normally tolerable "beguiling waywardness with historical record", Lloyd Evans nevertheless considered that Bond had gone too far in wanting "both to have his cake and eat it, to use history as the handmaid of modern ideology, while at the same time claiming a sort of objective truth for his visions". 3 This is not the moment to argue whether Bond, in the preface to Bingo to which Lloyd Evans is referring, was in fact claiming to present "objective historical truth" or even whether "visions" may be considered to be expressions of anything so concrete, but it is certainly worth noting that, particularly during the 1970s, Bond was not the only dramatist to employ what might be considered to be "a beguiling waywardness with historical record" in that many others could likewise be accused of quite calculatedly and perversely offering "at best" an alternative and "at worst" an iconoclastic interpretation of history.

Let us not run away with the idea that it is only the Establishment which seeks to maintain and if necessary defend its own version of history. As Trevor Griffiths was to discover from the critical responses to his own play, Occupations ( 1970), those who are opposed to the Establishment are as keen to maintain their own mythic history as they are to deconstruct that of their political opponents. In the wake of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Griffiths' play at The Place in London in 1971, in an article in 7 Days Tom Nairn criticised its portrayal of the Italian Marxist, Gramsci, and its dramatisation of the potentially revolutionary factory occupations that took place in Italy in 1920. Griffiths' letter of response to Nairn is appended to the published text of the play. As in most other debates concerning historical drama, the argument centred upon the

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play's historical accuracy and/or its "symbolic" representation of the historical forces at work within the events. The opening paragraph of Griffiths' response, itself prefiguring arguments that were to be aired again in the case of Jim Allen's Perdition, clearly outlines the nature of that controversy which is so often, and sometimes intentionally, provoked by historical drama. Griffiths wrote:

It's important to respond to historical plays as art-works, not as selected documentary accumulations containing historic-political speculations evaluable largely in terms of "known" historical and political reality. And we must learn to look for "historicity" more as Lukacs finds it in the histories of Shakespeare. As for example when Lukacs says: "Shakespeare states every conflict, even those of English history with which he is most familiar, in terms of typical-human opposites; and these are historical only in so far as Shakespeare fully and directly assimilates into each individual type the most characteristic and central features of a social crisis." Nairn's it's-either-historically-"accurate"-or-it's-purely-and-only-"symbolic" is just too crude and unfruitful a measure of the value of a play (or, indeed, of anything else). 4

Although of major importance, discussion of the significance for the modern historical dramatist of such concepts as "typicality", "historicity" and "symbolism" will be deferred to the more appropriate and expansive context of later chapters.

If then there is disagreement amongst critics of all political persuasions about how history should be represented, such disagreement is only exacerbated by the vagueness that obscures even the term "historical drama" itself. What is, in fact, fascinating about the genre is that its form and emphases alter with the social and political changes that are themselves the constituents of history itself. Indeed the very aim of this book will be to interpret one in terms of the other. But to return to the problem of definition. At the most fundamental level the settings of all plays will, of course, inevitably become historic in the eyes of succeeding generations simply in consequence of the normal passage of time. Each and every play would, however, even in the loosest application of the term hardly qualify as historical drama simply because its previously contemporary setting had now been superseded. Even a play set in a period earlier than that in which it was written may not, however, be considered to merit the description of historical drama for, normally, such drama is expected not only to be set in times past but also to resurrect actual historical personages or reconstruct actual historical events. It is also assumed that the dramatist will approach the facts concerning the recreated period or figure in a spirit of "serious scholarship". It is nevertheless usually considered too prescriptive for even the most scholarly of critics to demand that historical drama should confine itself only to the drama-

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tisation of those characters known historically to have taken part in the events described. Were such prescription to be enforced, the portrayal of the lowliest orders of society for which there is normally precious little historical evidence available would be banished from the stage, as indeed it has in some periods of historical drama, other than as bearers of either messages or spears. Perhaps, then, all that can be agreed upon about historical drama is the requirement of historical factuality in either or both character and event. It is therefore not surprising that historical dramatists have so often found themselves the target of censure when, owing to the very insubstantiality of the genre, almost limitless areas of potential disagreement are made available to the critic.

So comprehensive has been the reference to history in the post1956 British theatre that to examine the historical drama of the period is at once to take into account plays by many of Britain's leading contemporary dramatists, to recognise the influence of the fringe, mainstream and national theatre companies, and to refer to the work of theatre groups motivated by politics, community issues, education and, to a lesser extent, feminism. A high level of historical consciousness may indeed be seen as one of the precious few common factors detectable within a theatre whose claim to novelty was its aim to reflect social change and to explain, if not Britain to the British, at least England to the English.